In a cinematically sketched China, a journey for love
Heaven Lake
By John Dalton
Scribner, 451 pp., $26
''It's a grayer, more complicated world than I ever imagined," observes 24-year-old Vincent Saunders, the wistful hero of John Dalton's expansive debut novel, ''Heaven Lake." Leaving his small-town life in Red Bud, Ill., Vincent joins the Overseas Christian Fellowship and moves to the industrial city of Toulio in Taiwan to ''do the work of Jesus Christ." He takes a room in a boardinghouse owned by a single mother, Mrs. Chen, and her young crippled son, Shao-fei. It's a comfortable setup, despite the other boarder, a raucous Scotsman, Alec McGowan, an English teacher, frequent smoker, and smuggler of hashish.
Soon, with the help of his sponsor in Taipei, Vincent secures a house in which to start his ministry: a three-story residence with a classroom on the top floor. He offers classes in English and Scripture -- a two-for-one deal, free of charge, open to all, and, while anxiously awaiting students, takes a job teaching English to a class of bright, adoring private-school teenage girls. Just as the interest in his English/Bible study classes begins to escalate, so does his curiosity in one of his students -- a precocious and outspoken girl named Trudy. Also, during this time Vincent meets Mr. Gwa, a successful local businessman who takes him out on the town, including an unsettling trip to the local brothels.
Gwa's interest in Vincent is revealed when he makes him a bizarre offer -- to travel to Urumchi, a remote city in northern China, to find a beautiful woman, Kai-ling, whom Gwa had met months before on a business trip. They had fallen in love, but due to ''political problems . . . Taiwanese can't marry Mainland Chinese," they could not wed. However, he explains to Vincent, ''for foreigners it's different." Gwa proposes that Vincent go to Urumchi, marry Kai-ling, and obtain the necessary visas and passports to return to Taiwan, where their marriage would be dissolved, thus allowing Kai-ling and Gwa to marry without political impediment. Gwa offers Vincent $10,000 for the service. But despite Vincent's dire need for money, he adamantly refuses, citing his commitment to the Fellowship in Toulio, and his own moral views on the sanctity of marriage.
Vincent's religious convictions are effective in deflecting Gwa's scheme, but they prove to be no match for his growing feelings of alienation and loneliness. The arrival of another ''Jesus teacher" at the ministry house, the ''solidly, vigorously built" Gloria, only seems to exacerbate his longing for human connection and intimacy. So, what begins with a seemingly innocent kiss with Trudy reveals, much to his surprise, that ''beneath his pious, ordinary life lay a sheltered realm of craving all his own." It is this ''craving" that becomes his downfall -- as his affair with Trudy spirals out of control, Vincent's beliefs and his body take a beating, and as a means of escaping his shame, he contacts Gwa and accepts his offer.
Vincent's journey across mainland China, by turns harrowing and humorous, contains some of Dalton's most beautiful descriptive writing: ''A muddied seagull lighting down on a pantiled roof . . . a tangle of bicycle frames strapped like a teetering crown to the cab of a market van . . . an iron kettle thrust from a third-floor window and raining water onto a box of blue and white azaleas." In a barren, hillside town he spies ''a garland of orange lightbulbs . . . [giving off] a blurry, ill-formed halo of jaundiced light."
In Urumchi, Vincent meets Kai-ling, who is, indeed, as beautiful as Gwa promised, but she is also proud and elusive. Vincent is treated graciously by her parents, and with indifference by her younger sister, the plain Jia-ling. Preparations and paperwork for the wedding take longer than expected, and Vincent's trepidation about successfully fulfilling his end of Gwa's bargain increasingly grows, reaching a breaking point when, days before the wedding, Kai-ling refuses to marry him. Frustrated and hurt by the rejection, Vincent communicates with Gwa in a series of telexes that eventually instruct him to bring Jia-ling back to Taiwan to take Kai-ling's place. After a surreal wedding ceremony, Vincent and Jia-ling travel back to Toulio, each to uncertain fates.
Dalton has a deep affection for his hero, and he renders the events of Vincent's story with a vivid, cinematic intensity. But, because the tone of the book frequently sounds formal and prim -- employing florid turns of phrase and endless rhetorical questions -- Dalton's treatment of loftier, psychological themes feels distanced from the somewhat ordinary man to whom they are meant to apply. While at the end of the book Vincent seeks to reconcile his ''aloneness and [his] longings," the reader is left wondering if he, as a character, has been given the weight and sophistication to do so without Dalton's erudite narration.
''Heaven Lake" is at its most powerful when its brilliant portraits of the Chinese and Taiwanese landscapes yield emotional revelation. In one memorable scene, Vincent travels to Heaven Lake, ''a blue-veneered miracle . . . [of] stupefying beauty." It is through his communion with nature that his confusion and loneliness are alleviated, and he gains an authentic sense of resolve: ''Heaven Lake had shown him . . . that you could navigate your life without knowing. Even more, you could occasionally be awed by the mystery. You could sometimes love the mystery as devoutly as the believers loved their gods."
Nathaniel Bellows is the author of the novel ''On This Day." 
